Rudolph Engelmann

Funeral services will be held November 1st, 2006 for Rudolph Hermann Engelmann, native of Hewitt, and recent resident of Florida. Mr. Engelmann passed away quietly in his home in Atlantic Beach, Florida on October 6th, 2006 of heart failure. He was 77 years old. Rudolph was born March 5th, 1929 in Hewitt, Minnesota to Hermann and Louise (Kniep) Engelmann. He left home as a young teenager and worked at odd jobs on farms until he landed in the Army as a radar technician at age 17. He spent more than a year on Guam and the Marianas building and operating the islands' first radar stations. He later chronicled those experiences in a novel titled "The Emperor's Last Man". He was awarded a commission as 2nd Lieutenant in the Army Air Corps and spent several years working with fighter jet radar and electronics until his discharge in 1953. He attended college at the University of Minnesota and received the Baccalaureate degree in Psychology after 2 ½ years there. He chose to pursue, however, a career in engineering; and had taught himself enough to gain employment and top-secret security clearance at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. At Lawrence he worked on various projects as a troubleshooter of atomic bomb parts and designer of assembly systems. He occasionally had lunch with Edward Teller. He left Livermore in 1960 to develop a novel digital concept for high-speed computer clocks that were at the time limited to a top speed of about 20 kilohertz. The first machine was designed in his laboratory in Wadena, Minnesota, and built in a shop in nearby Sebeka. The device was far more successful than he had imagined, counting time at greater than 200 Megahertz. In addition to international acclaim he was awarded concept and device patents, which were licensed to Fairchild and IBM. This achievement launched a career as a consulting engineer, which took him to numerous technology firms including Hewlett Packard, Honeywell, Raytheon, Litton, 3M and others. In one case he was responsible for 21 patents awarded over the course of a year in designing a copy machine for 3M. He was regarded by his peers as a wizard of both analog and digital electronic design, an uncommon combination for an engineer. Over the years he invented numerous digital circuits which included digital adders, multipliers, dividers, and analog to digital converters. More recently he developed and patented digital power supplies and digital audio amplifiers for the concert industry. He spent his last years writing novels based on his memories. The inventive spirit never left him as he was constantly drafting designs for devices and systems which came to frequently. Rudolph Engelmann was preceded in death by his parents, Hermann and Louise, his daughter Halle on May 14, 1979; and his brothers Ardo (Scotty) and George (Bud). He is survived by his sons, Chris of Saint Paul, and Guy of San Francisco; and by his daughter Heidi Kothrade of Saint Paul. Services will be held at 1pm Wednesday, November 1st at Domian-Anderson Funeral Home in Bertha, Minnesota. In lieu of flowers, memorials can be sent to Our Lady of Good Counsel Cancer Home at 2076 St. Anthony Ave., St. Paul, Minnesota 55104.

Rudolph Engelmann

March 5, 1929 - October 6, 2006